End of the World
Week 3
She watches the movers’ truck manoeuvre the narrow pathway leading up to the house next door. She is sitting on the jutting grey rocks at the edge of her garden, the edge of the cliff. The sea roars and foams at the bottom of the cliff. It is angry. The sea does not like intruders.
From where she sits, she can make out the heads of the people crowding about the van. The rest of their bodies are blocked by the shrubs dividing the two plots. Hers and theirs. The floating heads are blonde, they seem to belong to a man and a woman. There are three other floating heads, two dark haired and another blonde, but all three of these have buzz cuts. She guesses they are the movers.
She does not see the heads of the children, they are hidden behind the wild thorny shrubbery, nature’s barbwire, but their voices float through the wet air and smack against her.
She wants to stand on the rocks to get a better view but she catches a glimpse of the neighbours, the Asian ones on the other side of her plot. They are both, man and woman, standing on the rocks, balancing off each other, peering into the garden, watching the newcomers. She does not want to be like them.
The blonde head with the ponytail raises an arm and moves it from side to side. It takes her a minute to realise that ponytail is waving. She slides off the rock, her heart beating in her ears, her breath trapped in her throat. She looks to the Asians. They have stumbled off the rocks and scurried indoors.
The sea roars. It is angry.
She sits up, her back resting against the rock. She can still see them from here, these new people. These new people who do not seem to understand the rules.
It’s on the Organisation’s brochure. It’s on the website. It’s all they talk about during the induction. There is to be no communication amongst those who have come to the edge of the world. The end of the world. Communication begets storytelling. Storytelling begets civilisation. Civilisation begets war. And those who have come here have come in search of peace. Peace is in isolation.
She looks above at the drone that has come to encircle the house where the Asians live. They must have seen her too. The drone turns to the new house and flies low. The sea splashes foam all the way up to her. It is warning her.
She picks up the book she had brought along, opens it and fixes her eyes on the page. The letters blur and form odd ominous shapes. She waits for the drone to retreat but she knows they saw her. Saw her looking.
It’s not as though they would kill her. It’s not so dramatic. But they would send her back and she had nowhere to go back to. Not anymore. How long has she been here? Years. Her hair used to be chestnut coloured and now it is grey. She braids it into two plaits parted at the middle. Surely that is indicative of how long she has been here. Isolated, in search of peace. And there is peace. There are no bombs. There are no guns. There are no people, none that she communicates with at least. It is the end of the world, the edge of the world.
She had spent all her savings to come here. A woman had approached her at the supermarket when she stood crying in front of the row of Lucky Charms cereal boxes. They had been the children’s favourite cereal. She had been doing well before that. Or appeared to be doing well which she supposes are two entirely different things. She had just moved to the safe country where it was always dark and cold and there were no olive groves or jasmine trees. She lived with her sister. Her sister was obsessed with clean eating and anti-ageing creams. The trivialities of privilege. She envied her but only briefly. She was already arriving at that place where nothing matters. Where there is no happiness, no excitement, no fear. Where there is only the endless humdrum of grief in the background, muting the world, turning everything to grey.
It was a strange existence in those days. Her soul, or whatever it was that made her who she is, had folded into itself, a lifeless weight that she carried around in her gut while her body went through the motions. Blood, tissue, muscle and bone, already she was forgetting things, her favourite colour, her favourite food, the songs she used to sing. She was flattening herself against the blandness of life.
So anyway, the woman at the supermarket handed her a brochure about the Organisation and said: “It’s an awful world we live in, isn’t it?”
That’s all she said. Sometimes she wonders if she imagined her, if she had picked up the brochure somewhere else, maybe at the AA meetings her sister took her to. But she doesn’t think she has. She remembers the woman wore a rubber cape and had grey hair down to her shoulders. It was raining outdoors. And she remembers thinking I wish I had a cape like that as she stood dripping in the aisle from her hair and from her eyes. She could have been drunk. Those days are all a haze now.
It never rains here at the edge of the world. The weather is always pleasant. Nothing here is ever extreme, even the flora and fauna is tamed. Sometimes she wonders if she really is at the edge of the world. Maybe she’s just on one of those uninhabited islands up north, a thirty-minute drive from her sister’s apartment. But that’s just cynical. And she doesn’t want to be cynical anymore. She doesn’t want to be a lot of things. Not cynical. Not sad. Not happy because too much guilt comes with that. And she does not want to be guilty. She just does not want to be. And yet, she doesn’t want to be dead either, otherwise she would be already. She just wants to surrender. To allow the world to consume her, swallow her whole.
It's getting dark and she is still sitting out, watching the house next door. When the lights come on, she stares at the lit up windows, the warm light reminding her of a time and a place, of the sensation of comfort, of hot tea and biscuits, of woollen socks. They are moving about the upstairs room. The parents shuffling back and forth from the window, probably unpacking. The children jumping on the bed. She looks away. She doesn’t like to look at children.
Someone is walking up the path towards her house. She slinks back into the shadow of the rock. It’s the woman with the ponytail, only her hair is loose now, long and glamorous. She fixes her eyes on the woman, watches how she presses the doorbell again and again, waiting, shifting her weight from one hip to another before finally giving up and placing something down on the concrete slab at the foot of the door.
She finds herself wishing she had a floor mat, something to make her house look nice. She had never thought of it before because why would she? She is not allowed to have visitors. Did these people not understand the rules?
She waits a while before crawling to the door to reach the carton. She is expecting a pie or a casserole. She is not sure why. But the woman is white and isn’t this the sort of thing white people bring? Instead, the carton is filled with magazines. She lifts it and hurries inside, bent over it like a thief. She is dizzy. She moves down slowly, feeling the kitchen floor beneath her, making sure it’s there before she sits cross legged. The kitchen fan whirs, and she glares at it making a shushing sound. She needs quiet. She needs to think.
Tabloid magazines, home and garden magazines, beauty, fashion, economics, everything and anything. The whole world was in these pages. She fans out the glossy covers. Her heart beats fast. She should not be so excited about news from the world. She should return these magazines. But she won’t, she knows she won’t, and she doesn’t know why the woman brought them to her but she doesn’t care now. Now it’s like someone holding a golden chalice up to her lips, the elixir almost touching her tongue, and asking her not to take a sip. She will take a sip. Of course, she will, it’s too late to stop now.
The sky turns and she is still reading. About different countries, different people, celebrities, movies, books, the benefits of aloe vera. Shafts of light slicing through the darkness. Pink. Orange. How long has she been here? Time is slipping through her.
The birds that came every morning to pick at the insects that gathered on the windowsill. They are chirping as they always do. The world is charging on. She feels for the second time how long it has been since she woke up here. How much of time has already passed since she arrived at the end.
She thinks on the new neighbours, arriving in their own car. They did not wake up here. How long has it been since she received any messages from the Organisation? She still orders her groceries from the Organisation’s co-op using her membership card. Everything still works as it always has but something about the way these neighbours are behaving is confusing things in her mind. And it thrills her.
The doorbell rings and she feels her insides harden and turn cold so that she cannot move. She has never heard the sound of the bell before, so shrill yet so beautiful. She is surprised to find that she is crying. She manages to crawl to the kitchen window, peers out. The children are aged between five and ten, if she had to guess, two girls and a boy. They are carrying fresh flowers. Where did they get them from? The online co-op doesn’t sell fresh flowers. And they don’t grow around here, only shrubs grow here in the wild. They lay them down on the matless concrete. She waits a while until she is sure they are gone before opening the door and snatching the flowers. She holds them in her arms and laughs out loud at the sheer wonder of it. Feeling something moist and alive in her arms.
She is certain now that they are trying to tell her something. But she remembers the drone. The drone was there yesterday. And now again, she hears it swoop down through her garden. She holds her breath as it buzzes incessantly. The sound is unmoving, buzz buzz buzz in the same spot to her right. She has done nothing wrong. She straightens her back, dusts off her pants and smooths down her hair before stepping outside. She watches as the drone hovers around the new neighbours, and she knows they have been caught out for what they’ve been doing, for communicating, disturbing the peace, bringing in the threat of war. But then the drone lands in their garden and the little boy squeals with delight as the father passes him a controller and handles the drone, turning it this way and that.
She turns to the Asians. They are watching too. They look at her and she looks at them and then at the house beyond them and the one beyond it. Everyone is watching. She wades through the distance between her gate and the newcomers’, and finds herself face to face with the woman, the wife, the mother with the glorious hair. The woman is in a shirt dress and holding a glass of something pink. Lemonade? Saliva forms and wets the lining inside her cheeks at the thought of lemonade, this thing from another life. This distant memory of sweet and tangy, of striped umbrellas, the sting of salt water, heat coming off the asphalt, of a rollercoaster, a blue sunhat, a fan on the balcony. Images flash through her as the woman says words and she can’t help following the hand that carries the glass of pink lemonade with her eyes. A wide rimmed coup, so pretty. She feels a warmth spreading from her heart centre and all through her body. She is aware of her blood flowing, of the air being pumped in and out by her lungs, of her body functioning incessantly, loyally. She is aware of the flowers in their garden. And on their patio, there are jasmine trees.
She focuses her eyes on the woman who is still speaking. “He thinks it’s an awful gift but I work in publishing and so I always have extra copies lying around and you know, I think magazines are an underestimated gift.”
He snorts but his eyes soften when he looks at her. He makes a joke, something about his wife complimenting herself and she laughs and slaps his shoulder. He hands the drone back to the boy who presses a button and off it goes. She jumps back. She can’t help it. She covers her ears.
“Oh, they’re a nightmare, aren’t they? All that buzzing. They don’t allow them in our old neighbourhood, but this is a new place, a new beginning, and we’re here to start a new life at the new school and make new friends.” She was looking at her but speaking in a voice intended for the child who did not seem to be listening.
New beginning. New life. New New New. But here is the end. The edge of the world. The end of civilization. They’re in the wrong place. She looks down at her feet and realises she is barefoot. She is trying to sort and organise all the words that she was told. Align and examine them. She fumbles with the words in her mouth. Presses her tongue down and curls her lips but nothing comes out. The woman narrows her eyes, cocks her head, glances at the husband.
“Not allowed.” It’s not a complete sentence but it will have to do, they must be able to understand.
“Not allowed?”
“To communicate.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you’re saying. We’re not allowed to communicate? Is that the neighbourhood rule?” She chuckles. “But seriously, we absolutely love the raw, end of the world feel of the area. The kids will love taking the ferry every morning to get to school.”
She looks over her shoulder to find her neighbours gathered behind her. She puts her hand up. She turns back to the woman.
“Ferry?”
“To the city. You don’t use it? I guess it hasn’t been so long since they closed down the social science centre up here and the old ferry was back in action. They reopened the public library too. I can’t imagine why it was closed for so long. I’m surprised you lot didn’t complain. In our old neighbourhood it’s all anyone ever did. Complain complain complain.”
“Social science?”
The husband is looking at her now. Him and his wife exchange glances. Something in the glance, some hidden bit of information. They know something. Something she doesn’t know. She looks back, the Asians are still there, watching the drone. They don’t know either.
All three children are standing beside the father now. He says something in a low voice, and they begin to laugh. Her ears tingle and she gazes at the children as their laughter grows louder and louder and louder. Joyous and untethered. The sound sets something loose inside her and she feels the years peel and fall off like flakes of dead skin and with them the sadness that had weighed her, the belonging that had strayed her, the loss that had moored her. And she too begins to laugh. Because it could hardly be the end of the world if sounds like these were still being made and still being heard.
Then, stripping off her clothes as she runs towards the cliff with open arms, she dives into the beautiful sea.
This was the story inspired by the card I pulled this week: The Ten of Swords
While the card portrays a powerful, painful and inevitable ending, one that is full of anguish and betrayal, it also signifies new beginnings. Let go of the end to allow for the beginning.